


Burn Brighter than the Sun

by Corycides



Category: Revolution (TV)
Genre: F/M, Orgy Armada
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-19
Updated: 2015-09-19
Packaged: 2018-04-22 10:55:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,425
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4832777
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Corycides/pseuds/Corycides
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Being tech support for the end of the world wasn't something Grace Beaumont was going to put on her CV, but she wasn't going to deny the responsibility either. This was her sin, and sharing it didn't make it any lighter.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Burn Brighter than the Sun

**Author's Note:**

> No matter how brutal life becomes, peace always reigns in the cemetery. 

 

Seven years before the Blackout

Grace woke up to the smell of coffee and the clunk of a cup against a desk. She opened her eyes, squinting blearily along a line of smeared equations, and realised she’d fallen asleep at the university again. She pushed herself up on her elbows, scrubbing her fingers over her face until she felt properly awake.

‘Morning,’ Ben said. He held out a muffin in a pink wrapper. ‘Breakfast?’

‘Of champions,’ Grace said, taking it off him. She picked off a chunk and popped it in her mouth. Sweetness hit her like a hammer and she closed her eyes in bliss. Cranberry and white chocolate, yes. She licked her fingers and stretched in her chair, rolling her head until her neck popped audibly. ‘What time is it?’

Six,’ Ben said. He checked his watch and pulled a face. ‘Five forty five.’

She raised an eyebrow at him sceptically. Ben had  never been a morning person. Most days he was only grunt-literate before ten. Under her squint, Ben ducked his head and pulled at his earlobe sheepishly. ‘Yeah, I was wanting to talk to you about something. A couple of things, actually.’

‘And I’ll need coffee for it?’

‘Maybe.’ 

Despite her better instincts, Grace was intrigued. She picked up the coffee and slouched back in her chair, the old springs creaking and her body settling into the familiar indent. ‘Grab a pew, Matheson.’

He looked around, sighed, and dragged a low library stool over for him to sit on. It shifted under his weight, the wheels sliding on the carpet. 

‘I’m getting married,’ he said. ‘Me and Rachel.’

Grace wrinkled her nose at him. ‘I knoooow?’

Ben laughed nervously and nodded, drumming his fingers on the desk. ‘Not at Christmas. Now. Next month. Two weeks.’

Ohhhh-kay. The coffee was hot and cafeteria bitter. It was still coffee though. Grace took a drink, scalding her lips, to give her a second to think. 

‘She’s pregnant?’ she asked.

He nodded, blowing out his cheeks on a sigh.

That required another drink of coffee, and a bite of the muffin, as Grace checked her reaction to that. They’d dated - her and Ben - for a couple of years. There’d been a time she’d thought it might end up being more than just dating. It hadn’t. She was a little surprised to realise she was OK with that - although she wasn’t sure what she’d expected her reaction to be. Some sort of rom-com attack of jealousy that would lead to a hilarious series of hi-jinks as she tried to get him back.

Well, she’d never liked rom-coms; and if she had married Ben, they’d be divorced by now.

She’d known  that since she met his mother - and oh, how long had it been before she could excise the acidic  sainted  from in front of her. Heather Matheson had been a lovely woman - but she archived her life and her ambitions in the context of ‘her boys’. Ben adored her; Miles resented her; Grace was nothing like her.

Oh, and his dad was a cold-eyed racist. That hadn’t helped.

‘Wow,’ she said, mugging surprise. ‘That’s...’

She hesitated, raising her eyebrows, and waited.

‘Great,’ Ben confirmed, a slow smile spreading over his face. ‘Everything is happening a bit earlier than planned, but this is all what I wanted.’

‘I’m glad. Congratulations, Ben,’ she said. It was nice to mean it. She reached over the table and patted his hand. ‘You and Rachel will be very happy together.’

‘We were hoping you’d be happy with us too,’ he said. ‘And Dr Jaffe.’

Grace choked on a bite of muffin. ‘That’s a weirdly staffed kink,’ she said.

He laughed. ‘No. That’s the other thing I wanted to talk to you about. I’m leaving the university, I think there’s a home for my work in the private sphere. With you, and Jaffe, we could make significant discoveries, Grace.’

Usually, Grace only allowed herself to be lost for words once before lunch. Today she was apparently binging on it. She set the coffee down and rubbed her hand over her shorn skull, shaking her head in bemusement.

‘This is a lot to take on before nine,’ she said.

‘I know,’ Ben said. ‘It’s just, I’d really like you to be on board, Grace. I respect your work.’

She hesitated. ‘I’ll think about it.’

‘We could really make a difference, Grace,’ he said.

* * *

 

Seven months before the Blackout

Grace had never been particularly religious, but she was church-going. As a child, because she had no choice; as an adult, because it gave her a feeling of continuity that her life otherwise lacked. Also, if she was being honest, from an obscure feeling that she would be disappointing dead relatives in a heaven she didn't really believe in if she didn't. 

Church was one of those social structures that wheedled its way into your brain and nested in the basement under rational thought. Which was why she sometimes caught herself singing hymns under her breath as she worked.

The old classics usually, the stand-bys.

Today it was an old childhood staple that was rattling around her brain like a tuneful stone, 

'This little light of mine, I'm gonna let it shine...'

Rachel glanced up from prying a bundle of lint out of Danny's fingers.

'Ironic,' she said. 'Considering what you do here.'

You, not we. Maybe Rachel's sabbatical was going to be extended. Again. Grace straightened up from the computer, simulations stitching each other together and apart on the screen. 

'Our nanites are hardly the worst weapon they have under development,' she said mildly. 'Compared to  some  of the stuff I saw in the Tower, our little lights out is positively non-lethal.'

Rachel pinched her lips like she smelled something bad and strapped Danny back into his carrier. He lay back and watched the world with the wide-eyed, passive wonder of a very ill, very young child.

'Ben won't listen to me,' Rachel said. 'Maybe he will listen to you. I think this live test is a bad idea. The nanites aren't safe, I don't trust our safety parameters out of the lab.'

Grace frowned. It was a familiar expression these days. She was always frowning over simulations, or funding cuts, or background checks, or her mom's nursing home bill, or her sister's latest Kickstarter. This was a new frown. It was her 'shit' frown. If there were flaws in the security protocols or the programming, the whole project would be stalled.

More than that. The fact they had missed something  that central to stopping the world collapsing in a puddle of grey goo, would mean stripping the project back to naked theorem and starting from scratch,

'What's the problem?' She grabbed a notebook and pen, the end chewed to splinters. 'Is it the replication safeguards? I was concerned that the feedback loop was brittle, but Jaffe  assured  me the last upgrade had beefed them up. They looked good, but...'

Rachel rubbed her eyebrow with the back of her wrist. 'It isn't that.'

'Then what? The energy discharge protocol? We are working on that, Dr Warren has come up with some interesting applications that should...’

‘It’s just not right,’ Rachel said. ‘People are going to get hurt. You have to make Ben listen, delay the live trial.’

Grace clipped her pen on the notepad and set it carefully aside. ‘Rachel...’

Long hands clenched into bony fists. ‘It’s risky.’

‘Then you shouldn’t have sold out to Flynn,’ Grace said. ‘I voted against it, remember.’

‘Yet here you are.’

‘ If  my work is going to be used as a weapon,’ Grace said. ‘Then I’m going to make sure my part of it isn’t going to end the world. That’s all I can do. Maybe you should do the same.’

Rachel pulled back, crossing her arms. ‘Ben doesn’t need me to-’

‘That’s what I mean,’ Grace said, waving a finger at Rachel. ‘That’s what I don’t  get.  You’re one of the most intelligent women I’ve ever met. You’re smarter than me, you’re smarter than Ben. So, why are you always in the backseat? Why don’t you want this.’

‘It’s going to kill people.’

‘So did radioactivity, it was still worth inventing,’ Grace said. She flapped her hand. ‘I just...I don’t understand you. I never have, Rachel. You just always step back, let someone else run the show.’

Rachel bent down and picked up Danny, jiggling him in an absent rhythm against her hip. ‘If this goes wrong, Grace, do you really want to be the one running the show?’

* * *

 

Seven months after the Blackout

 

It seemed like the world was never going to stop burning. Grace slung her messenger bag over her shoulder, the weight of scavenged tins and bottles tugging at her, and hurried home through the shattered streets. There was an airplane, what was left of one, crashed in the middle of the street. It had ploughed through a shopping centre, covering the tarmac with glittering splinters of glass and metal. 

At least the reek of the dead had faded as it got colder.

In New York it would be cold too. It was a familiar, self-flagellating thought. No point to it now. Her mother had been elderly, confused, on a variety of medication to thin her blood, correct her heart, manage her liver… If Grace assumed no other disaster had affected the neighbourhood, her mother had died in pain and filth and confusion in the first week after the lights went out.

Her sister…

Paula was an addict. She'd been surviving in marginal situations since she was sixteen. Grace chose to believe she had as good a chance as any of getting out of the city alive - if she didn’t raid a dealer’s stash and meth herself to death, that was.

She hadn’t tried to reach them. Logic could sometimes be a painful thing. Or maybe it had been fear. She wasn’t sure.

When she got back to the house - broken windows and charred walls - Ben was waiting on the stoop. He bolted to his feet when he saw her - relief washing over his face. 

‘Grace,’ he said. ‘You’re still here. Thank God, I thought we’d lost you.’

Part of her wished he had. Pointless, or at least too late. 

‘Get inside,’ she said instead. ‘I don’t want to draw attention.’

She’d bought the house as a fixer-upper when she’d got her share of the government buy-out, full of plans to renovate and rehabilitate the old place. Things had been so busy at work that the only things she’d actually managed to complete had been shoring up the basement and laying a new lawn out back.

The lawn was covered with weeds again, but she’d reason to be grateful for the basement. She hurried Ben inside, wedging the door shut behind him, and then led him down into the cellar. The lights flickered on as she walked down the steps, revealing a small, bare room lined with metal wire.

Ben reached out to the wall and stopped, fingers an inch from the copper. ‘A Faraday cage?’

‘The interface can be tracked,’ Grace said. ‘After  this? I don’t know if I trust the people that have them.’

She swung the bag off her shoulder, dropping it on the floor, and stripped out of her jacket, leaving her in jeans and a sweat-stained t-shirt.

‘You trust me.’

‘I don’t know,’ Grace said. ‘Should I?’

‘Grace...’

She turned and jabbed her finger at the wall of schematics on the wall. Print outs, sketches, rows and rows of formulas for increasingly far-fetched scenarios. ‘This  shouldn’t have happened, Ben. There were failsafes. We had failsafes  for  the failsafes.’

‘Nanotechnology is dangerous-’

‘That’s why we’re  careful,’  Grace snapped at him. ‘That’s why - when Rachel came to me - I rechecked everything. In the live trial,  everything went to plan. The nanotech functioned to specification. It still is. The interface still works, I can still connect with the nanites directly, but I can’t turn them off. Because  something  changed, and only you or Rachel had the security access  and  know how to change it. I don’t think she did it.’

Ben’s face looked...hollow, like his skin was wax and his eyes thumbed-deep bits of glass.

‘Grace...’

He didn’t admit it, but he didn’t deny it either. Grace’s shoulders slumped, the confrontation rendered pointless by the fact she’d been right. She’d marshalled so many unassailable arguments, beautiful things of evidence and circumstance. These huge things that she had spent months polishing and preparing, and she’d only just realised that she’d wanted him to smash through them like they were playing Angry Birds.

‘Why, Ben?’

He sat down hard on the steps, hunched over like there was a pain in his stomach. ‘They were...convincing.’

‘About this?’

‘It wasn’t meant to be like this. It was meant to come back on, it was meant to make a point, it was…’

‘Can you fix it?’

He nodded. ‘I could.’

It should have made her stomach lift with joy. Hope. Logic could be a terribly painful thing, though. 

‘Why haven’t you?’

He looked up, his eyes reddened and haunted. ‘Because I found out what they plan to do next.’

Grace sat down next to him, shoulders pressing together with old familiarity. ‘How terrible is it that I’m relieved it wasn’t my science that failed?’ she asked.

‘Pretty terrible,’ Ben said. It was a joke. It tried to be a joke, but it was brittle and see-through. ‘Are you going to tell Rachel?’

‘If I do, could she cope?’

‘No.’

Grace sighed. ‘Then no.’

 

* * *

 

Six Years After the Blackout

 

They had to use Danny as an anchor, the little boy the only thing that stopped Charlie from sneaking out to go find Rachel. Grace put them both to sleep in the spare room, dragging a patchwork blanket up over small, too-thin bodies. The room was already laid out for a child. It had been there when Grace moved in, and she figured it would be as good a cover as any.

The last few years, she’d learned that the more lies you told the easier it was. If everything was a lie, there was no chink of intimacy to let anyone slip through.

Unless they knew all your lies.

She went downstairs, habit making her skip the step that creaked. Ben was standing by the window, looking out from behind the curtain. He’d lost weight and was sunburned, the skin on the nape of his neck peeling pinkly. His friend was sleeping on the sofa, snoring softly. 

‘Does he know?’ she asked quietly.

Ben turned, glancing at Aaron. His expression was an odd mixture of affection and calculation. ‘No. I don’t want him to either, not until I’m ready. Everything has to be in place before we can act. We have to be  sure it’s the right thing to do, the right  time  to do it.’

‘This time.’

Ben sighed and nodded, rubbing his hand over his face. ‘Yes. This time. I-’

Aaron groaned in his sleep and rolled over, twisting the blanket around his legs. His feet - bloody bandages around the heels and toes - stuck over the arm. Grace and Ben both fell silent, breath caught, until he settled back to sleep. 

‘Maybe we should talk outside,’ Grace said, raising her eyebrow.

Ben nodded. He fell into place behind her, quiet until they got outside. The sky was...unbelievable. Still. It was blacker than ever before, the stars endless and impossibly bright. Even the silence was deeper, wider, than it had been.

Unwilling to linger on the porch, Grace stepped off and led the way through the paddock to the barn. She had a couple of goats. Technically. They mostly fended for themselves, to be honest. Sometimes they would come back to the farm, eat her sheets, and stare at her with alien eyes. Tonight, though, the barn was empty.

‘Where are you going?’ she asked.

‘I don’t know,’ Ben admitted. He barked out a laugh, scrubbing his hands over his face. ‘Oh. It feels so good to say that out loud, you have no idea.’

Grace closed the door and leaned against it. ‘Wisconsin.’

He hesitated. ‘That’s a long way, Grace. What’s in Wisconsin.’

‘Low density population and good farmland,’ she said. ‘It’s a fair place to live, it’s not a rich place to own.’

He nodded and leaned back against one of the stalls. ‘A good a place as any, I suppose,’ he said. ‘Last I spoke to Rick Clark he was heading to Georgia, he thought the ports there had the best chance of contacting...anyone.’

Grace gave him a sardonic look. ‘Great idea, Ben. Go to the slave state with your extremely Aryan children. That’s got all the earmarks of something that will end well.’

‘I know Georgia’s the South, but-’

‘They call it indentured citizenry,’ Grace said. ‘Apparently you can earn your way to a mint julep and a nice suit, but most people don’t. The Republic is hardly a bastion of human rights, but other places are worse, Ben.’

He looked...deflated...somehow. 

‘What?’ she asked.

‘Every step on the way here I was...cursing my brother and Monroe, just damning them all to hell,’ Ben said. ‘Except you’re right aren’t you? However shit they are, it’s what they had to be to survive what I did to the world. What we did.’

He broke down, wracking, mute sobs jerking through his body like they’d crack his bones to get out. Grace had her own bouts of that raw, frantic weeping, the pointless grief that wrung you out until all that was left was twisted rags of emotion. She went over and pulled him down into a hug, squeezing him as tight as she could until her bony fists had to hurt. He didn’t complain; he did kiss her.

It wasn’t planned, on either of their parts. He had Rachel; Grace had a man in town who thought she was a widowed accountant from Washington DC. Besides, that would have been  some  rom-com hi-jinks, wouldn’t it? Ending the world to get your man.

Ben’s hands were rougher than she remembered, workman’s calluses scruffing his fingers and palms. She supposed she was different too. It had been a long time since they’d seen each other naked.

It was quiet and oddly tender, in the end. Whatever anger they’d harboured with each other - over secrets kept, secrets uncovered - seemed pointless at this stage. He touched her like she was a once familiar instruments, hands and mouth alternately sure and tentative. Grace kissed his face, his hands, and helped get them both out of their clothes.

They didn’t talk. None of the words they had helped anymore, they both knew that.

The long, wiry length of his body covered hers, the flesh she remembered now tough and stretched over slabs of bone. Wrapping a hand around his neck, sunburned skin hot against her fingers, she pulled him down into a kiss. 

It surprised Grace how well they remembered each other’s bodies. They fit together with a sort of worn grace, his hand in the hollow of her waist and her leg hooked around his. The slow rock of their bodies spilled them both over the edge after a hazy while. It felt like relaxing more than release, a warmth unwinding all the tension in their body.

Afterwards, they took what time they could. Just lying there on the itchy hay and hard dirt until they’d caught their breath and the sweat had dried on their skin. Grace got up first, bare and slight, to light the single, battered lantern.

When she turned around to look at Ben, he looked old in the flickering light. It carved his wrinkles deeper, turned his skin sallower. He was old, Grace supposed. In this world the nanites had made, both of them were verging on elders.

‘We should go in,’ she said. ‘I doubt Charlie is going to sleep long.’

Ben reluctantly got up, dressing with slow deliberation. He pulled his baggy, faded t-shirt over his head, tugging the collar to get it to sit straight.

‘I wonder sometimes, what they’ll think of me when this is all over,’ he said. ‘Their father, who ended the world and brought it back. Tried, at least, to bring it back.’

Pulling her t-shirt in, Grace shrugged. This was the one bittersweet piece of information she’d come up with over the years that rang true.

‘We’ll be dead by then,’ she said. ‘So I don’t suppose we’ll care.'


End file.
